Femtocells—building-based wireless access points interfaced with a wired broadband network—are traditionally deployed to improve indoor wireless coverage, and to offload traffic from a mobility radio access network (RAN) operated by a wireless service provider. Improved indoor coverage includes stronger signal, increased bandwidth, and improved reception (e.g., video, sound, or data), ease of session or call initiation, and session or call retention, as well. Offloading traffic from a RAN reduces operational and transport costs for the service provider since a lesser number of end users consumes macro RAN over-the-air radio resources (e.g., radio traffic channels), which are typically limited. With the rapid increase in utilization of communications networks and/or devices, mobile data communications have been continually evolving due to increasing requirements of workforce mobility, and, services provided by femtocells can be extended beyond indoor coverage enhancement.
Conventional systems that employ femtocells, transport information (e.g., data and/or voice) from a user equipment (UE) including Internet bound traffic through a landline network to a mobility core network. The information is received at the mobility core network and the Internet bound data can be identified and routed to the Internet from the core network. This hairpin type of traffic routing can lead to significant network resource utilization and can cause congestion in the landline network and/or mobility core network. Further, since data sent by the UE is routed to the Internet from the mobility core network only after traversing through the landline network, the response time is substantially high.
Traditional femtocells transport UE traffic to the mobile service provider network (e.g., core network) via a home broadband service (Digital subscriber line (DSL), Cable, Fiber, etc.). During UE-to-UE communication, the traffic is directed from one UE to another via the core network, even when both the UEs are attached to the femtocell. Accordingly, bandwidth utilization in the traditional approach is inefficient and can negatively impact performance and customer satisfaction.